Essays on History and New Media

Below are links to essays devoted to the theoretical and practical aspects
of taking history into a digital format—many of them by people associated with
the Center for History and New Media. We would like to expand this list and
welcome suggestions of essays that might be added.

Using New Media to Teach East European History

T. Mills Kelly

This article was originally published in Nationalities
Papers 29, 3 (September 2001): 499-508 and is reprinted here
with permission.

For decades the residents of Taos, New Mexico have
been afflicted by a low frequency humming–sometimes louder,
sometimes almost inaudible–but never completely absent.1
On almost every college campus in North America, the buzz about
using technology in teaching can be almost as annoying–and
with each passing year, it gets louder. Although recent events in
the American stock market have taken a good deal of the shine off
of the idea that the internet will fundamentally transform the economy,
in higher education there seems to be no corresponding waning of
enthusiasm for the infusion of new media into the educational experiences
of students.2

Anyone resisting the adoption
of new media technologies in their professional lives runs the risk
of seeming a recalcitrant neo-Luddite, falling rapidly behind the
rest of us as the technological wave sweeps inevitably forward.
Boosters for new media love to put skeptics to flight with data
such as those produced by the Campus Computing Project demonstrating
that more than forty percent of all college courses use Web resources,
up from just eleven percent in 1995. And faculty are all too aware
how far behind our students we are falling when it comes to creating
new media content. Already, close to half of all college undergraduates
responding to a recent survey report that they have their own websites
and seventy-five percent report going on-line at least once per
day.3 Faced with
data like these, it is no wonder many of us feel pressured to do
more with technology.

Not surprisingly, the debate
over the role of new media on campus too often takes on the sort
of either/or quality that leads to polemics–technology is
a universal good/ technology is evil.4
To be sure, a number of scholars, most notably historians, have
thought very carefully about how new media are changing higher education,
especially where either the practice of our craft, or our pedagogy
are concerned5
However, we are still a long way from understanding the best ways
to integrate technology into the teaching half of our professional
lives, primarily because almost every single essay, book, or conference
paper dealing with the changes new media are bringing to our courses
says almost nothing whatsoever about student learning. By now we
know a great deal about how new information technologies are reshaping
our pedagogy, but it is a serious mistake to assume that learning
is a reflex of teaching. Too often American scholars writing about
classroom innovation base their claims for student learning entirely
on the intelligent looks on students' faces at the end of
the term.6 By
contrast, in the United Kingdom and Australia, mandated assessment
regimes, for all the hardships they have imposed on faculty, administrators
and students, have also resulted in at least baseline data on what
students are and are not learning in a whole range of disciplines.7
A recent example of how far we still have to go in the United States
comes from the Journal of American History, which recently
published the results of a round table discussion on "Teaching
the American History Survey at the Opening of the Twenty-First Century."
In this round table the participants described the many and varied
ways they teach their foundation course in American history–and
not one of the participants offered any concrete evidence that any
of their pedagogical strategies actually work. Moreover, all but one of the eleven participants was dismissive of new media as something
worth incorporating into their course. As one participant put it,
"I see no need to offer more of what they are already getting
plenty of elsewhere in our culture." None of these experienced
scholar-teachers seemed troubled by the irony of such remarks, given
that their round table discussion took place via interactive new
media.8

This particular example–faculty
who use new media to dismiss its value in the educational enterprise–is
emblematic of the transitional stage we find ourselves in today.
New media technologies are invading our campuses from every direction,
but most faculty are still not adequately prepared to integrate
the new technologies into their pedagogical goals and expectations.
If we are going to progress beyond this transitional stage and remain
in control of what happens in our courses, we must set aside the
hyperbole and ask how student learning can be changed by the new
media technologies–either resulting in better learning, or
in substantively different learning outcomes. Otherwise, beyond
satisfying our need to feel "with it," those who do
begin to incorporate more and more new media into their teaching
will be spending a great deal of time creating new learning resources
that may yield very little benefit to their students and therefore
to themselves. Instead, as it becomes possible to demonstrate how
new media are changing student learning and how they are not, faculty
can incorporate the new technologies in increasingly appropriate
ways. Once this begins to happen, those who currently are less enamored
by the prospect of the incorporation of new technologies into the
curriculum will be more easily persuaded that the new technologies
have some benefit after all.

Beginning then, with what
we do know , it is possible to state with confidence that
new media technologies are not a universal good in the higher education
classroom, with a few mundane exceptions. To be sure, once a professor
begins to weave Web resources into an existing course, a whole litany
of student excuses cease to be valid: "I lost my syllabus,"
"I didn't know the paper was due today!" and so
on. As gratifying as it may be to reject these student excuses by
pointing to the class website, that alone is hardly sufficient justification
for all the work required to create the Web resources. At the same
time, a mounting body of anecdotal evidence gathered by faculty
across the country indicates that the more new media technologies
are incorporated into our courses, the better students like the
course. And certainly if students are excited about the course,
the odds are better that they will actually end up learning a substantial
portion of what we want them to learn–however, evidence for
this conclusion remains anecdotal.

Fortunately, more specific
evidence is beginning to emerge that new media can and do positively
influence student behaviors in ways that often lead to improved
or at least different learning outcomes. One example of how the
inclusion of new media in a traditional course can yield favorable
results has to do with the degree to which students engage in recursive
reading of sources. Good scholars return to the same pieces of evidence
over and over again, considering many possible meanings of their
sources before finally committing themselves to one interpretation.
Therefore, historians–to cite the example I know best–hope
that our students will learn this skill, not only because it is
an example of what we like to call "critical thinking,"
but also because it is one very important way that they develop
a stronger sense of the interrelatedness of historical evidence
and of change over time. Several researchers have examined students'
recursive reading patterns in their courses that use new media and
find that their students do this sort of recursive reading (and
analysis) more often when accessing sources via the Web than they
do when accessing the same materials in print.9
A second area where new media are showing signs of improving student
learning is collaborative learning. Most teachers lament the lack
of meaningful discussion in their classrooms, and there is a substantial
body of research demonstrating that collaborative learning does
improve critical thinking.10
College students today are perhaps the most connected people on
the planet–they have cell phones, beepers, use instant messaging
services, spend hours in chat rooms, and cannot live without their
e-mail–but just try to get them to argue with one another
in class! So much of their communication with one another is now
mediated with technology, it should be no surprise that a substantial
number of today's students find communication via new media
to be more agreeable than face to face communication. Thus, it also
should be no surprise that scholars teaching courses utilizing new
media to enhance collaborative learning find that for those students
whose learning style fits well with the technology , outcomes
improve.11
And, just as is true with any teaching innovation, those students
whose learning style does not fit well with Web mediated forms of
communication tend to perform less well.

Given the currently limited
but growing base of research on how new media can transform student
learning, how then can those of us interested in nations and nationalism
integrate the new technologies in ways that are appropriate to whatever
our pedagogical goals might be? The most obvious way is to "reverse
engineer" our courses–starting with desired student
learning outcomes rather than focusing on how much content we can
squeeze into the semester or quarter.12
Once we are very clear on exactly what it is we hope our students
will know at the end of the semester, then we can reasonably ask
which capabilities of the new media might help us achieve these
pedagogical goals, which will make it more difficult, and which
might result in altogether different outcomes.13
For example, in my course dealing with modern Eastern Europe, this
process of reverse engineering led me to focus on several primary
pedagogical goals distinct from my desire to have my students be
able to remember the difference between Slovaks and Slovenes, or
for them to be able to write an essay detailing the events of 1848.
Instead, I am much more interested in my students being able to
describe in detail how a number of grand themes in the history of
Eastern Europe: the importance of nationalism, what it meant to
Eastern Europe to be either on the periphery or at the center of
European events, the role that foreign domination played in the
history of the region, and so on. When it comes to nationalism,
I devote a great deal of my time helping them arrive at a more mature
understanding of how national identities are constructed, how scholars analyze both national identities and the process of their construction
(and perpetuation), and the role that gender plays in both the construction
of national identities and in their analysis. The course itself,
like all of my courses, places a great deal of emphasis on collaborative
learning, research with primary source materials, and requires students
to be "architects of their own learning," meaning they
pick and choose from various learning options during the semester
to construct a package of learning opportunities best suited to
their own predilections.14Two
of the recurring problems faculty encounter with our students'
use of the World Wide Web is that many students assume that if something
does not exist on the Web, then it does not exist, and that if it
does exist on the Web, it must be a good source. This uncritical
approach to knowledge acquisition is, of course, not new to higher
education. For generations faculty have lamented our undergraduates'
inability to find appropriate sources in our campus libraries, and
many of us address this pervasive problem by conducting library
orientations. Now we are confronted by students increasingly ill-disposed
to even enter the library, because all the knowledge they need surely
exists on the Web!15
Because so many of them are uncritical readers of web-based information,
these students are even less well equipped to sort through the myriad
of available information, the vast majority of which is unedited
and free from the scholarly apparatus of peer review. But, telling
our students that they should not rely on the Web for their research
is akin to telling students twenty years ago that they should not
use calculators. While cyberpundits make many good points about
the Web as a place where scholarship can exist free from the stultification
imposed by the publishing industry, when it comes to our undergraduate
students, most of us wish for more control over content rather than
less.16 Almost
every educator can offer a horror story of a student who built an
entire essay around some egregious site located via one of the popular
search engines, and those of us who teach about nationalism in Eastern
Europe and the former Soviet Union probably have more of these stories
than most, given the number of tendentious sites produced by and
about or region of study.17

Like many of my colleagues,
I have read more than my fair share of such essays. One example
that sticks in my mind occurred several years ago. A student in
my Eastern Europe survey course wrote a paper on the Croatian UstaÓa
state drawn almost entirely from several websites and their associated
links.18 In
his paper, the student asserted that despite the any outward appearances
of popularity, the PaveliÄ regime had essentially no support among
the Croatian people (although, he wrote, PaveliÄ himself had some
heroic qualities), and almost all Croats actively supported the
Partisans. Moreover, he wrote, quoting his source, "Serbs
suffered great casualties at Jasenovac prison camp while the Croats
lost even more people in Bleiburg Death Marches starting in May
1945." Certainly, the events at Bleiburg and Jasenovac were
two of the greatest tragedies of the Yugoslav civil war of 1941-1945,
and one should not minimize massive loss of life anywhere. However,
in neither case has an accepted casualty count been established
to the satisfaction of the non-Croat, non-Serb scholarly community,
and so I was naturally puzzled to learn that the Croats had been
victimized "even more" than the Serbs during the war. As I worked my way through this student's references, it became
abundantly clear that he had relied heavily on a selection of Croatian
nationalist websites, most of which mixed together fact, speculation,
and outright fantasy to create a compelling historical narrative,
usually with plenty of pictures, maps, and first-person testimonials.
As bad as this was, even worse was the fact that, despite my admonitions,
this student had no familiarity with the existing conventional literature
(books, articles) on his topic. In order to avoid such problems
in the future, as part of my reverse engineering of this course,
I redesigned the essay requirement. In the current iteration of
the course, students now write their essays on how national identities
are constructed (or reconstructed) and how history is placed in
the service of the nationalist imperative. Starting with a recent
essay by Hugh Agnew that discusses these processes (at least partially)
in a new media context, the students are then required to compare
Web resources they locate to existing scholarship on whichever national
group they select.19
Because Agnew's essay includes both Web sources as well as
conventional sources, it gives the students a framework for analysis
that combined both the sources they prefer and the ones they do
not. In this way they analyze both the content of the nationalist
narrative and the presentation of that narrative, whether in print
or in new media, and ask critical questions about how presentation
can privilege certain parts of the content over others. I am happy
to say that this past semester one student wrote her paper using
the very same Croatian nationalist websites as her predecessor two
semesters earlier, but because she was analyzing them as nationalist
artifacts, rather than as historical evidence, and because she contrasted
them to the conventional literature on the events and people they
describe, her essay was a model of historical analysis at many levels.

New media can also be used
to accomplish another goal of many of us who teach about nationalism–helping
students understand our scholarship as a dynamic and evolving conversation
among experts rather than as a selection of published work on the
library shelf. Until recently the only way it was possible for students
to observe this conversation was to drag them off to one of our
conferences, and as we know most conference sessions tend to be
long on presentation and short on debate. The other alternative
was to have the students read three or four years worth of production
by scholars interested in nationalism and to understand all these
essays and books as a conversation, albeit one taking place in print.
The round table of American historians cited above is but one example
of the thousands of scholarly exchanges taking place in new media
environments–e-mail lists, threaded discussions, chat rooms,
and so on. Because organizations such as H-Net (www.h-net.msu.edu)
archive these discussions, they are now available to us as pedagogical
tools. In a recent course on nationalism in Eastern Europe I used
one such discussion which took place on the H-Net list HABSBURG,
to introduce my students to the gendered nature of many such discussions,
especially where East European topics are concerned.20

The participants in this
particular discussion were responding to reviews on HABSBURG of
Branimir Anzulovic's, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide
, and of Noel Malcom's Kosovo: A Short History .
The two-week long discussion of these works and the reviewers'
comments on them was wide-ranging, ultimately bringing in more than
twenty scholars who offered thirty-nine discreet comments either about the works, the reviews, or directed at one another. Students
in the class were directed to identify indications of the gendered
nature of this debate and to be ready to discuss how the debate
might have been shaped by whatever they found. Because they were
being asked to analyze "expert conversation" rather
than acquire content knowledge, my students warmed to the assignment,
and the first thing they all noticed was that not one of the twenty
participants in this discussion was female. Not surprisingly, the
first question they generated in their own discussion forum was
what percentage of the HABSBURG membership was female. Although
the membership numbers fluctuate from week to week and no exact
count is kept by the editors, at the time of this particular discussion
approximately 20% of the HABSBURG membership was female. In our
discussions, which took place both on the Web and in class, many
students focused on the degree to which the participants in the
debate emphasized the military side of what was happening in Kosovo,
with one student arguing forcefully, that if women had been participating
in the debate there would have been more discussion of the social
consequences of Serbian and Albanian nationalism. "What about
the mothers? Why aren't any of these historians talking about
them? " she kept asking. While reading these postings through
the perspective of gender was a difficult task for the students,
and one that they could not achieve mastery of in a single assignment,
having access to the full range of the expert discussion made it
possible to have such a discussion at all. Further, because much
of their discussion took place in the same medium–a threaded
discussion forum–as the conversation they were analyzing,
the students seemed much more willing to engage one another in real
debate, as opposed to simply agreeing with one another and being
supportive, than is typically the case in an undergraduate classroom.
Finally, because their contributions to the discussion forum were
often made as they were reading comments by experts in the field,
they often mimicked the style of the scholars, writing in more complex
sentences and with a better vocabulary than is common in such mediums,
where student writing is often fragmentary and overly casual.

These specific examples
are but two possibilities from the many and varied opportunities
that new media provide. As more and more of our campuses become
sufficiently wired, our students will be able to access immediate
multimedia experiences that conventional teaching cannot readily
provide–encounters with visual images, music, and text more
or less simultaneously. Surely such encounters hold the possibility
of different learning, if not better learning, however, only if
that learning takes place within the context of specific pedagogical
goals. The examples offered here are not revolutionary, but are
at least indicators of something different going on that could not
be so readily achieved with conventional sources. At the same time,
they are evidence that new media technologies can influence student
learning only if they are put in the service of specific pedagogical
goals within the context of a particular course. However, if the
objective is to "ramp up" a course purely for the purpose
of having it, or some part of it, exist on the Web, any measurable
change in student learning will be coincidental rather than intentional.

Footnotes:

2
See, for instance, Diana C. Oblinger and Sean C. Rush, eds. The
Future Compatible Campus. Planning, Designing, and Implementing Information
Technology in the Academy, (Bolton, MA: 1Anker Publishing, 1998)
and Deborah Lines Andersen, "Historians on the Web: A Study
of Academic Historians' Use of the World Wide Web for Teaching,"
Journal of the Association for History and Computing , III/2,
August, 2000 http://mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCIII2/ARTICLES/anderson/index.html
for but two of hundreds of possible examples.

4
See, for example, the excellent summary by my colleague Paula Petrik,
delivered at the American Historical Association's national
conference in Chicago (2000), ""We Shall Be All":
Designing History for the Web." Available on the Web at: http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/kelly/Articles/petrik.htm.
On the negative side, one can read such oft-cited works as Sven Birkerts,
The Gutenberg Elegies. The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age,
(New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994), and on the positive, a recent
example is, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding
New Media, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).

6Of
course, every discipline has a literature on student learning, even
my own-history-although most of the research that exists on student
learning is concerned with what happens during the K-12 years. Among
the best examples are Samuel S. Wineburg, "Historical Thinking
and Other Unnatural Acts," Phi Delta Kappan , March 1999:
488-499; and by the same author, "Reading Abraham Lincoln: An
Expert/Expert Study in the Interpretation of Historical Texts,"
Cognitive Science , 22/3, 1998: 319-46; and Robert B. Bain,
"Into the Breach: Using Research and Theory to Shape History
Instruction," in Knowing, Teaching & Learning History.
National and International Perspectives , Peter N. Stearns, Peter
Seixas, and Sam Wineburg, eds. American Historical Assocation, (2000):
331-52.

7
One good example of how much farther these matters have progressed
in the United Kingdom is the upcoming National Seminar 'Researching Teaching and Learning in History' http://hca.ltsn.ac.uk/conf/ns-research.htm
(May 2001) at the University of Glasgow's Subject Center
for Archaeology, Classics and History http://hca.ltsn.ac.uk/.

8
"Teaching the American History Survey at the Opening of the
Twenty-First Century: A Round Table Discussion," Journal
of American History, March 2001: 1409-1441.

9T.
Mills Kelly, "For Better or Worse? The Marriage of Web and the
History Classroom," Journal of the American Association for
History and Computing, III/2, (August 2000) http://mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCIII2/ARTICLES/kelly/kelly.html;
and, John McClymer for "Inquiry and Archive in a U.S. Women's
History Course" in Works and Days 31/32, 1998: 1-13.

10See,
for example, Anuradha A. Gokhale, "Collaborative Learning Enhances
Critical Thinking," Journal of Technology Education
Volume 7, no.1 Fall 1995, http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JTE/v7n1/gokhale.jte-v7n1.html;
and "Powerful Partnerships: A Shared Responsibility for Learning",
A Joint Report of the American Association for Higher Education, the
American College Personnel Association and the National Association
of Student Personnel Administrators, June, 1998.

13See,
for example, Peter Stearns, "Student Identities and World History
Teaching, " The History Teacher , 33/2, February 2000:
185-93.

14The
idea of students as architects of their own learning is hardly new,
but has recently been described in print by Elizabeth Barkeley, in
her course portfolio project for the Carnegie Foundation, "From
Catastrophe to Celebration: Analysis of a Curricular Transformation,"
http://kml2.carnegiefoundation.org/gallery/ebarkley/.
This site is password protected, but can be accessed via the Carnegie
Foundation main page at http://www.carnegiefoundation.org.

15
"Choosing Quick Hits Over the Card Catalog," New York
Times, August 10, 2000

16One
example of the many debates around the issue of peer review and Web
publishing is a recent discussion that took place among H-Net editors,
following the American Historical Association's 2001 national conference.